Twitter has promoted a new feature that allows the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country (in theory at least) - but is is a feature... or a nasty bug?

From the site: "The problem is that in a way, that is worse. Twitter, and the net in general, are by nature a global communication platform. National conflicts on the internet (for example, an album being released in October in the UK and December in the US) are strange and illogical. Before this announcement, Twitter was a global platform on which something was either said or not said, on a global scale. Now, Twitter’s new power to enforce censorship depending on your country both legitimizes the blocks and concedes international territory specifically to countries that “have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.” This diplomatic casting of the restriction of speech, from a company that is build around the idea of free communication, is troubling."

Not in the US? Petition the State Department The State Department constantly speaks out about internet censorship in other countries. Pressure them to speak out about America's new domestic censorship system.

"any legal action that would cause people to hesitate to exercise their right to free speech for fear of the legal consequences"

Yeah. Fan girl of botgirl's identity related posts in general and I am passionate about topics like identity, privacy, freedom of expression, blah blah blah.

The continued story of the nym wars

"They will do this using their real names; they do this with fake identities. It’s about BEHAVIOR, not about names."

"Most current arguments against the use of pseudonyms revolve around the question of ‘civility’, suggesting that spaces in which ‘real names’ are required are more congenial places to be. Civility is important, but so is ensuring that people feel safe to speak up for their beliefs. Rather than implementing exclusionary policies to force civility, we should look to more comprehensive solutions toward changing the way we treat each other in online discourse. "

Supporting your freedom to choose the name you use on social networks and other online services.

This is to make a point about the "reasons" people say that real names should be used online. The idea is to use it in a discussion thread/forum on the topic of birth/legal/government name vs use of an online nickname of pseudonym and see how quickly you can get bingo.

"The conclusion is as unpleasant as it is inevitable. The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in the next stage. All this in defense of their lucrative monopoly that starves the public of culture."

So this is Henry Reese’s story — about the Huang Xiang, a poet who’d spent 12 years in Chinese prisons before he was banished to silence in the United States. Reese and his wife, the artist Diane Samuels, invited the poet to Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum.<br />
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Huang Xiang -- His hosts countered: why not begin by painting his poems on the house he would live in for two years — just down the alley from the Reeses’ house on the North Side of Pittsburgh. It was an important sign from the community that people came out, in numbers, in the rain, to watch a Chinese poet paint his life on the walls of what had once been a crack house. It was something else when the neighbors began stuffing their own poems into Huang Xiang’s mailbox.<br />
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“That’s when I knew,” Henry Reese says, “that freedom of expression was going to resonate with people who have had no connection with what we call literary life, and that this could be a powerful force for change in our community, which is what it’s become.”

This post covers freedom of speech (for those countries lucky enough to actually explicitly have this right) vs freedom of expression (in social media); Context vs Intention (#IAmSpartacus); digital media working for and against us; asks you if your your social media policy might open up the organization to potential complaints, suits, and liabilities; rights and responsibilities. "it is up to us to say and do the things that share not only who we are, but also who we want to be personally and professionally."
Caveat: Freedom of speech as a constitutional right is applicable in the US/America but is not an explicit right in Australia.

"What slumber parties were about—their real purpose in American girlhood—was the provision of a liminal time away from family and school, a zone of imagination in which (theoretically, at least) nobody but the chosen were permitted. Slumber parties are my first memory of a time in which I was asked to prove loyalty to a family of choice, rather than one origin, by enduring in a series of tests designed to push the limits of my personal and emotional boundaries. All while wearing pajamas.""Teenaged girls have always acted out sexually, and authorities have always scapegoated those they perceive as transgressive in this way."